Thats the real probelms. Every looks at a windmill and thinks 'well at least its not generating and CO2 and its making electricity' and stops there.
Its when you examine the impact of how you integrate the ruddy things into the system, you realise that they are probably making piss all difference, and costing a mint.
I dont personally give a shit if scotland wants to , at its OWN expense, and unsubsidised, build windfarms all over the north sea..and export the power at a competitive rate to the UK.
With no subsidies and grants.
I object to having them rammed down my throat when I cant see the benefit, and paying extra for the privilege, thats all.
Course there is. Nuclear. But it doesn't come under 'renewable'. and the EU has stupidly made targets for 'renewables' and is subsidising to make it happen, and its causing severe problems and costing us a packet.
It doesn't need to route half the countries capacity.
No it doesn't. There are back up sources *distributed* around the system. The power generated in Galashiels is used locally and the backup resources local to Galashiels are left on standby..
Exactly. The reality is that you do NOT get power from a power station local to the headquarters of the company you buy it from, that may be many miles away. Your power is always generated locally and they somehow work out between themselves and the National Grid who pays for what.
Why? The power generated in region X is used in region X with appropriate backup for when the wind doesn't blow. Your argument is predicated on a region having a surplus of wind power. In that case it's used in the adjacent regions, not at the other end of the country.
It's not TOTALLY a question of cost, as much as a question of sheer practicality. There is a point where cost and enviromental impact escalate to such an extent that its very arguable as to whether its cost otr practicality you se to describe the limiting factors.
Nearly all renewable energy is like that: being essentially ultimately derived from sunlight, which there ain't a lot of and its fairly diffuse, you need massive sizes of installations to get power from ANY renewables,. They simply don't have the power density of fossil or nuclear.
Like my grosser calculations that we would need to cover 60% of the UK with photocells to generate enough power for the whole country....is that merely a matter of cost? Or is it merely plain daft.
Cost is inextricably related to energy: If for example, there is a copper shortage (there is), it becomes economic on account of rising prices to extract lower grade ores that require more energy to process. For example.
Now lets look at windmills. In order to work reliably with no outages, we need to either have a 6 times (roughly) overcapacity in generation OR back them up with pretty much the SAME capacity of gas turbines OR string a load of power cabled round the country and merely oversupply by s factor of - say three. In every case you are using *at least* twice as much (possibly 6 times as much) scarce, expensive, and on account of that, energy intensive, copper than an equivalent nuclear set.
All of which needs to be manufactured transported and erected somewhere..offshore? add a nice premium for access difficulties, Boats don't run on windmills yet..
With factory equipment being largely a matter of a few people and a lot of big machines, factory costs themselves are very energy dependent for 'big stuff'. Energy is expensive and getting more expensive. The market itself is limiting fuel usage.To bootstrap into a non carbon based economy, the last thing we ought to be doing is using excess energy to build windmills that are either not turning cs there is no wind, or switched off because we have so many to cater for the former case, that we cant use what's left over.
When it boils down to it, fossil fuels or nuclear are the only things that really have the energy DENSITY and RELIABILITY to allow the building of compact high output stations locally to where the power is needed.
If you don't want CO2, build nuclear. Don't build windmills.
I AM arguing that nuclear is preferable to renewables, because renewables cannot do the job at *ANY* price. Certainly not at the sorts of prices that we could realistically get private finance for, and do you really want another 10% on your tax bill, heating bills in the thousands and petrol at £2 a liter, so you can have windmills?
Someone once calculated that to give everybody in the country the best medical care that money could buy, would take about twice the gross national product.
That is not 'just a matter of cost' that is a matter of physical impossibility.
No. They only happen twice a day. not continuosly.
On many days it doesn't. And I've yet to see it shine at night.
If
It is not a matter of political will. It is a matter of costing more than the total wealth in the world to implement effectively, to the levels required to sustain the population levels we have at the standards they are at, and utterly transforming the planet into a giant power station to do it. To the detriment of just about everything else, food included.
Frankly it would be more devastating in its effect than global warming.
Viz your silly statement about 'only a matter of political will'?
This is precisely the problem, ignorance of even basic considerations.
Renewables are low density energy supplies. To run enough renewable sources to supply the country would use up vast areas of land, and require huge amounts of materials and manufacturing to set it all up.
Then theres the cost. Renewables typically cost at least double the price of fuel generation, plus since huge investment in gen plant & transmission would be needed, energy prices would at least triple. Thats going to hit the economy in every area, badly. So all sorts of ripple effects on peoples lives.
People dont take kindly to imposed order. Mugabe may be a son of a bitch, but he is THEIR son of a bitch.
African genocide is arguably simply a natural response to poverty,. When starving, if someone else isn't, reach for the machete (or assegai possibly: these days the Uzi or AK47)
To be brutally frank, forget most of Africa. The population will do what it always has done. Die quickly and nastily. To a level where they feel comfortable. We had the Black death, the plague, the civil war, WWI, WWII..let them have their fun till they trade violence and tribalism for education, and development.
I see some MP has yet again proposed double summertime for England, one of the supposed benefits being to align us with Europe. I wonder if he's really thought through what will happen if our morning rush hours are aligned.
Not really. At the risk of a similarly broad-brush generalisation, a lot of it is due to corrupt higher-ups who don't like the idea of democracy, because then they lose their gravy train. In the meantime, they feather their nests, and brutally suppress anyone who puts that at risk. And that goes all the way down the chain of command to the petty wannabe dictator with an AK, a small cadre and a set of camos who terrorises villages for fun and profit.
A great deal of blame here lies with the rest of the world, with America, China and Russia largely the culprits, treating the African countries as pawns in a three-way chess game. They're back-pocketing anyone who can be relied upon to maintain power as effectively (=viciously) as possible whilst remaining loyal to their power-bloc paymaster of preference, and assigning contracts (and natural resources) to their paymaster's designated contractors. Britain and France don't really help, they're also still playing the game.
Blimey, which C19th hole did you crawl out of?
It's sentiments like that that cause the alienation and contempt of the West that breed extremism.
It is the moral responsibility of the "developed" countries to help African countries find their own, non-violent and inclusive, route to representative government of their own design. Not as colonial or post-colonial overlords, but as penitents seeking to repair the damage they caused.
And the chances of the power-bloc governments genuinely doing so?
Aha. So once again we see that the *real* agenda here is the same one as usual: irrational hatred of the turbines themselves. Somehow a lamp-post every few metres down every road in the country is no problem whatsoever -- but 'a windmill every hundred yards' represents *the end of everything*...
Yes - I don't know whether the economic arguments against wind farms are valid or not, but it does seem to be people who live next to fields who are most convinced by them :)
The message from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:
In any one place (apart from some odd situations on the South coast) but at any one time you can find tide at every stage in its cycle somewhere round the coast.
Going down the East Coast high tide times for the first half of today were:
The sun isn't simple to turn into electrical energy. It's good for heating, but we simply haven't got effective enough technology to make it a viable option yet. Tidal power does seem to be a pretty good option. I do like the idea that someone prepared to suggest that a renewable technology isn't actually that good is "anti-green". I don't think anyone *wants* to bugger the planet up...
I think his point - and it's a reasonable one as far as I can tell - is that where there's space and wind - e.g. the Scottish Highlands - there are hardly any people, and there aren't even many people in the adjacent regions either.
IIRC Bjorn Lomborg calculated that the money that will be spent on meeting CO2 targets in the future could feed, water, educate and provide medicine for everyone who is currently lacking them. Whether you think giving countries everything on a plate is a good idea or not is a different matter - it does seem that how well a developing country does is inversely proportional to the amount of aid recieved.
I would think that any country that has the resources to deal with rising sea levels would already be able to look after its population. We apparently can't deal with rising sea levels in the UK...
Some neighbours of ours worked for +15 years organising funds for a hospital to be built in Mogadishu (capital of Somalia). Finally in early '90s it was finally up and running... for precisely 6 months.
It was burnt to the ground in a day during one of their frequent civil uprisings.
I don't like lamp-posts either, in fact why don't they kill two birds with one stone and adapt the lamp-posts to windmills ? 100 foot giants marching down YOUR street/motorway anyone?
Everyone always forgets that each windmill needs concrete foundations the size of a small house to keep it upright and concrete manufacture is one of the most energy intensive and polluting processes known to man.
Furthermore I suggest you take a trip and watch them in action on Monday evening (clue: you'll be disappointed).
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